Introduction
By Nicole A. Raineault, William Mowitt, and Carlie Wiener
In this ninth installment of the ocean exploration supple-
ment to Oceanography, we present highlights of the latest
field seasons of three vessels that contribute to exploring
the world ocean: the Ocean Exploration Trust’s (OET)
Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus, NOAA Ship Okeanos
Explorer, and Schmidt Ocean Institute’s (SOI) Research
Vessel (R/V) Falkor.
In 2018, the programs expanded efforts in the Pacific
Ocean. Falkor explored the southern and eastern Pacific,
Nautilus ventured further north to the Canadian seamounts
and west to Hawai‘i in the central Pacific, and Okeanos
Explorer investigated the Gulf of Mexico and US Atlantic
margin. The year 2018 also marked one decade of ocean
exploration through NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration
and Research (OER) and E/V Nautilus. Read on to learn
about this season’s new discoveries, tests of novel tech-
nologies that will improve our ability to learn about the
ocean, and the array of education and outreach activities
that reach ocean explorers globally. We also include some
retrospective pieces that provide insight on just how far
our programs have come over the last 10 years.
The Ocean Exploration Trust celebrated its tenth
E/V Nautilus field season by conducting missions that
ventured further north and west than ever before. This
supplement’s first section briefly reviews our history
(pages 14–19), sampling (pages 26–29), and education and
outreach programs (pages 30–35) that demonstrate our
commitment to innovating approaches and techniques
that improve our exploration capabilities and engagement
with students and the public. We then report on initial
results and discoveries from the 2018 Nautilus field season,
which explored the west coast of North America, from
British Columbia to Southern California (pages 36–37). We
surveyed previously unmapped seamounts and areas criti-
cal to understanding seabed mining impacts and explored
the new underwater lava flows off of Hawai‘i (pages 46–49).
We also tested technologies that would improve our ability
to sample rocks and enhance the information we collect on
mapping cruises (pages 38–39). A continued partnership
with NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries brought
us to the expanded area of the largest US marine protected
area, where we discovered several new species on remote
seamounts (pages 50–51).
The second section of this supplement focuses on the
advances and accomplishments of NOAA’s Office of Ocean
Exploration and Research and Okeanos Explorer. In 2018,
the ship returned to the Atlantic basin, reaching a decadal
milestone of exploration voyages. We review that decade
and how this US ocean exploration program, with its ded-
icated flagship, is achieving the 2000 President’s Panel for
Ocean Exploration’s vision for an innovative and bold pro-
gram that conducts voyages of discovery (pages 58–69).
We highlight the vision’s connection to the Blue Economy
(pages 70–71) and then NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer’s evo-
lution and core capabilities (pages 72–73) before turning
to OER’s renewed focus on the Atlantic Seafloor Partner-
ship for Integrated Research and Exploration (ASPIRE)
(pages 74–75). Okeanos Explorer’s passage through the
Panama Canal provided the opportunity for an expedition
in the Gulf of Mexico, which included the first exploration
of the sunken tugboat New Hope, and we describe our Gulf
work (pages 78–81) before reporting on a series of ASPIRE
Port side of what is believed to
be the tugboat New Hope, which
was sunk during Tropical Storm
Debbie in September 1965. Image
credit: NOAA OER